Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (25 page)

A Nigerian housewife has reported seeing an apparition of the Virgin Mary in the window of her bathroom in the city of Lagos. “I walked into the bathroom at about five a.m. and was shocked and overwhelmed by fear with the visible appearance of the Virgin Mary,” Christiana Ejambi told reporters. Since then the Blessed Virgin has reappeared several times and has given Ejambi messages on a number of subjects, including religious faith and how to control the crowds that have gathered to witness the miracle. Per the instructions of the Virgin Mary, only three people are allowed into the restroom at a time; everyone else has to wait their turn.

“Red meat is
not
bad for you. Now blue-green meat,
that’s
bad for you.”
—Tommy Smothers

On any given day, half the people in the world will eat rice.

Uncle John was cruising the information superhighway when he crashed into this hilarious article on one of his favorite topics
—
places with weird names. It’s by Kathy Kemp, author of
Welcome to Lickskillet: And Other Crazy Places in the Deep South.

Plan to hit the road next summer, but don’t know where to go? We don’t mean to be rude, but have you considered Hell? Hell, Michigan, that is. (And you thought you had to drive south.) For a different kind of vacation, check out this tour of off-road America, where unusual names are the main attraction:

1. Hell, Michigan.
If you’ve always wanted to see Hell freeze over, visit this place in winter, when the Highland Lake dam often gets icy enough to stop the water flow. In summer, when temperatures are moderate, the town has a “Satan’s Holidays” festival and a road race called “Run to Hell.” In October is the “Halloween in Hell” Celebration. The town got its name in 1841, when George Reeves, an early settler in this low, swampy place in southeast Michigan, was asked what he thought the town should be named. “I don’t care,” Reeves said. “You can name it ‘Hell’ if you want to.”

2. Slapout, Alabama.
Oscar Peeples, the town grocer in the early 1900s, was forever waiting on customers who asked for things he didn’t have. “I’m slap out of it,” Peeples would say. This central Alabama community, north of Montgomery, is now little more than a crossroads, with a church, bank, barber shop, and the tumbledown remains of Peeple’s old store.

3. Noodle,
Texas. In the late 1800s, Texans often used the word
noodle
to mean “nothing,” which is exactly what they found when they arrived at this locale near Abilene. Now there are two churches, a store and an old gin. For nearly a century, the population has held steady at about 40 people.

4. Joe, Montana.
When quarterback Joe Montana signed on with the Kansas City Chiefs in 1993, a Missouri radio station urged the folk of Ismay, in southeast Montana near the North Dakota border, to change the town’s name to “Joe.” The sports-minded citizenry, all 22 of them, voted in favor of the change, and a new industry was born. In fact, money raised from selling “Joe, Montana” souvenirs enabled the town to build a new fire station.

5. Lizard Lick, North Carolina.
Since 1972, the residents of this town, 16 miles east of Raleigh, have held lizard races every fall to herald the farming community’s unusual name. It dates back to the days when the area was home to a federally operated liquor still, and lizards were brought in to cut down on the insects. Traveling salesmen noticed the creatures and dubbed the community Lizard Lick.

6. Chicken, Alaska.
The village, in the Alaskan wild near the Canadian border, is named for a bird, but not the one you think. In the late 1800s, gold miners found a reliable meal in the abundant
ptarmigan,
a grouse-like critter whose white feathers make it look, from a distance, like a chicken. When the townsfolk decided to incorporate in 1902, none of them knew how to spell
ptarmigan.
So they went with the look-alike Chicken to avoid the jokes a misspelled name would incur. Unfortunately, poultry jokes now abound. The town has a full-time population of about 30 people and mail delivery every Tuesday and Friday. There’s a saloon, but no telephones or central plumbing. Incidentally, the
ptarmigan
is now the Alaska state bird.

7. Spot, Tennessee.
A dot in the road about an hour west of Nashville, Spot was named by a sawmill operator who was always writing folks about business. One day, pen in hand, the sawmill operator sat at his desk, worrying over a letter from postal authorities wanting to know what to call the town. A spot of ink dropped onto the sawmill operator’s white stationery, and the town had its name. By town, we mean a couple of houses and a ramshackle store.

8. Peculiar, Missouri.
In spring of 1868, Postmaster E. T. Thomson decided to name his town “Excelsior,” but postal officials told him it was already taken. Thomson reapplied with new names, and received the same response time after time. Exasperated, he finally told postal officials to assign the town a unique name, one that was “sort of peculiar.” Peculiar, near the Kansas border just south of Kansas City, is home to about 1,800 people.

9. Zap, North Dakota.
A Northern Pacific Railroad official, in charge of naming settlements on the line, named Zap after Zapp, Scotland, because both places had coal mines. The city, about 15 miles south of Lake Sakakawea, encompasses one square mile and is home to about 300.

10. Embarrass, Minnesota.
If faces are red here, it’s only because the town—205 miles north of St. Paul—is typically the coldest spot in the continental United States. The midwinter temperature often drops to –60°F, and snow has been known to fall in June. The name comes from early settlers, who used the French word for obstacle—
embarras
—to describe the hardships they faced in the frigid territory. Today, the population is largely Finnish. They celebrate their thriving community with a Finnish-American Festival every summer.

Think the preceding towns have nutty names? Here are some more.

•
Idiotville, Oregon

• Knockemstiff, Ohio

• Monkey’s Eyebrow, Kentucky

• Satan’s Kingdom, Vermont

• Toad Suck, Arkansas

Q:
Which weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of gold?

A:
“Surprisingly, a pound of feathers weighs more. Feathers are weighed according to the avoir-dupois system, which measures 16 ounces to the pound. Gold is weighed according to the troy system, which measures 12 ounces to the pound.

“Now, which weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of lead? Tempted to say lead? Of course, since they are both weighed according to the same system, a pound of lead weighs exactly the same as a pound of feathers.” (From A Book
of Curiosities,
by Roberta Kramer)

NFL great Vince Lombardi coined the term “game plan.”

There’s nothing like a good dose of irony to put the problems of day-to-day life in proper perspective.

• New York State Assemblywoman Nancy Calhoun recently pled guilty to charges that she harassed her ex-boyfriend in 1999. According to the ex-boyfriend, the harassment included “bursting into his home in the middle of the night; tail-gating him in a car; and posing as a cosmetics saleswoman in order to get the phone number of the man’s new girlfriend.” Calhoun was co-sponsor of the state’s anti-stalking legislation.

• In 2000 a branch fell off a tree in Nevada City, California, and struck a power line, cutting off power to the town for more than 30 minutes. The outage delayed the courtroom trial of the Pacific Gas & Electric Company, which was charged with “failing to trim vegetation around power lines.”

• In October 2000, a gunman armed with a .38-caliber revolver held up a Head Start school in Stapleton, New York, and escaped with $11,000 in cash and jewelry. The man was later arrested… and identified as a local minister, who used the money to pay the rent on his church for the next six months.

• In January 2000, a British professional soccer player named Rio Ferdinand strained a tendon in his leg and had to be put on the team’s disabled list. Cause of injury: “He left his leg propped for too long on his coffee table while watching the Super Bowl on TV.”

• A fire destroyed a $127,000 home in Maui, Hawaii; fire investigators identified the cause as a short in a fire-prevention system. “This is even worse than last year,” the homeowner told reporters, “when someone broke in and stole my new security system.”

• In October 2000, a British government official rode his bike to a local pub, where he met with citizens to discuss their concerns about crime in the area. During the meeting, his bike was stolen.

Say cheese: Kodak founder George Eastman hated to have his picture taken.

One of the lessons we’ve learned over and over again at the BRI is that there’s a pretty interesting story behind just about everything, no matter how small it is or how ordinary it may seem to be in our lives.
We
learned it again when we started researching the history of postage stamps.

One afternoon in the mid-1830s, an Englishman named Rowland Hill happened to observe the response of a housemaid when the postman delivered a letter to her. In those days, the recipient of a letter, not the sender, paid the postage due on it—and the recipient could refuse to accept delivery if they wished.

That’s just what the housemaid did, but there was something unusual about the way she did it: she studied the outside of the envelope, almost as if she were looking for some kind of hidden message. Then, she handed the letter back to the postman and refused to pay the postage due on the letter.

Hill knew what would happen next: The postman would take the letter back to the post office and throw it onto a pile of hundreds or probably thousands of similar “dead” letters that clogged every English post office in the 1830s. Sooner or later the post office would return that letter to the sender, free of charge.

In other words, every dead letter sent through the English mail in those days was sent through
twice
—first to the recipient (who refused it), and then back to the sender—even though no postage was ever collected from either the sender or the recipient. The enormous cost of delivering, storing, and returning so many dead letters was passed on to paying customers in the form of higher postage rates. Thanks to this and other glaring inefficiencies, in the mid-1830s, sending a letter across England could cost as much as an entire day’s wage—historians estimate that those years saw the highest postal rates in the history of the English Post Office.

Translated from Greek,
philatelist
(stamp collector) means “lover of something untaxed.”